Rosie O’Donnell Got a Facelift — After Swearing She Never Would

Rosie O’Donnell was, by her own account, the last person who was ever going to get a facelift.

“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts,” the 64-year-old wrote in a poem titled “Decisions,” posted to her Substack on Monday. “Not casually — morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never — ever.”

And then, in January, she got one.

The procedure — a lower deep-plane facelift — came after O’Donnell lost 50 pounds and, by her own description, felt like she no longer looked like herself. “I wanted to still be me,” she told NBC News in explaining her thinking. The surgery cost more than she’d ever spent on anything like it, and she called the whole thing both a privilege and a source of “shame.”

The Poem

The essay-poem format is very Rosie — raw, funny, self-implicating. She didn’t try to spin the decision into something tidy. She called the facelift a “betrayal” of the position she’d held for years, acknowledged the contradiction fully, and published it on Substack anyway. It’s the kind of honesty that tends to land well, and predictably, it did.

O’Donnell joins a growing list of celebrities who’ve been candid about cosmetic work — Kris Jenner has been vocal about her own deep-plane facelift, and the procedure has had something of a cultural moment. But what makes Rosie’s version different is the two decades of on-the-record opposition she had to reckon with first.

The Bottom Line

She said she wanted to still look like herself. She said it came with guilt. She said it cost a lot. Then she posted the poem for everyone to read. If nothing else, it’s a more honest accounting of the decision than most people give.